Abstract
Motion perception is a pervasive nature of vision and is affected by both immediate pattern of sensory inputs and prior experiences acquired through associations. Recently, several studies reported that an association can be established quickly between directions of visual motion and static sounds of distinct frequencies. After the association is formed, sounds are able to change the perceived direction of visual motion. To determine whether such rapidly acquired audiovisual associations and their subsequent influences on visual motion perception are dependent on the involvement of higher-order attentive tracking mechanisms, we designed psychophysical experiments using regular and reverse-phi random dot motions isolating low-level pre-attentive motion processing. Our results show that an association between the directions of low-level visual motion and static sounds can be formed and this audiovisual association alters the subsequent perception of low-level visual motion. These findings support the view that audiovisual associations are not restricted to high-level attention based motion system and early-level visual motion processing has some potential role.
Highlights
Perception is shaped by both immediate pattern of sensory inputs and our prior experiences with the external world
As the proportion of coherent dots was increased, they perceived the direction of motion in the direction of physical displacement, and the direction discrimination performance of each observer was improved (Figures 2A,B)
Motion coherence level had a similar effect on reverse-phi direction discrimination
Summary
Perception is shaped by both immediate pattern of sensory inputs and our prior experiences with the external world. Of particular interest is that associative learning (the process by which an association between two stimuli is learned) revealed unexpected levels of sensory plasticity and changes in visual motion processing (Schlack and Albright, 2007; Schlack et al, 2007) These studies mostly focused on a single sensory modality (i.e., vision). As learning in natural settings typically involves multisensory input, such unisensory learning might not be optimal for engaging learning mechanisms adapted to operate in multisensory environments Consistent with this ecological argument, multisensory associations have, in a series of recent studies, been discovered to have dramatic influences on the perception of visual motion (for a review see Shams et al, 2011)
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